PARIS – Kim Kardashian said a silent prayer — for her sister, her best friend, her family — as a masked man pulled her toward him in a Paris hotel room in the 2016 jewelry heist that changed her life. She was wearing only a bathrobe. She was bound with zip ties. She thought she wouldn’t survive.
“I was certain that was the moment that he was going to rape me,” she told a Paris court Tuesday. “I absolutely did think I was going to die.”
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The last time Kardashian saw the men that police say robbed her, she was bound at gunpoint and left locked in a marble bathroom while masked assailants stole more than $6 million in jewelry. Nearly a decade later, she returned to Paris to face them — this time from the witness stand.
Her testimony marked the emotional climax of a trial that has gripped France and reignited debates about fame, privacy and what it means to live — and nearly die — in public. The night in her suite during Fashion Week in 2016 forever altered her relationship to fame and safety.
Dressed in black and wearing dark sunglasses, Kardashian stood in the packed courtroom across from her mother, Kris Jenner. Her voice broke as she thanked French authorities for “allowing me to share my truth.”
She told the court that the attackers arrived dressed as police officers, with the concierge in handcuffs. “I thought it was some sort of terrorist attack,” she said.
She described how they tied her hands with zip ties, dragged her to the bathtub and pointed a gun at her temple. One robber gestured toward her ring. “He said, ‘Ring! Ring!’ and he pointed to his hand.”
French prosecutors say the men who orchestrated the heist — most in their 60s and 70s — were part of a seasoned criminal ring that tracked Kardashian’s movements through social media. Two of the defendants have admitted being at the scene. One claims he didn’t know who she was.
Twelve suspects were originally charged. One has died. Another was excused due to illness. The French press dubbed the group les papys braqueurs — “the grandpa robbers” — but prosecutors insist they were no harmless retirees.
Kardashian, who once shared nearly every moment of her life online, later acknowledged the role that visibility played. “People were watching,” she said in a 2021 interview. “They knew what I had. They knew where I was.”
Earlier in the trial, Kardashian’s childhood friend and then-stylist Simone Harouche recalled hearing her scream from upstairs: “‘I have babies and I need to live.’ That is what she kept on saying, ‘Take everything. I need to live.’”
Harouche, who hid in a downstairs bathroom during the robbery, said she texted Kardashian’s sister Kourtney and their bodyguard: “Something is very wrong.” She later heard Kardashian hopping down the stairs with her ankles still bound. “She was beside herself,” Harouche said. “She just was screaming.”
Harouche testified that the robbery “forever” changed her friend’s sense of freedom. “She now has a completely different lifestyle,” she said. “In terms of security, she can’t go alone, she doesn’t go alone to places anymore. To lose your sense of freedom ... it’s horrible.”
Judge David De Pas asked whether Kardashian had made herself a target by posting photos of herself with “jewels of great value.”
“No,” Harouche replied. “Just because a woman wears jewelry, that doesn’t make her a target. That’s like saying that because a woman wears a short skirt that she deserves to be raped.”
At the time of the robbery, Kardashian was one of the most photographed women in the world, a global fashion icon and social media pioneer. In the days that followed, critics, including designer Karl Lagerfeld, said she had shared too much. But as details emerged — the gun, the silence, the helplessness — public sentiment shifted.
In the aftermath, Kardashian withdrew from public life. She developed severe anxiety and symptoms of agoraphobia. “I hated to go out,” she said. “I didn’t want anybody to know where I was … I just had such anxiety.”